Professional Interests

I have an interest in all phases of software development: design, implementation, quality control, support and management. I am particularly interested in software simulation and modelling problems requiring analytical and mathematical skills.

Computer Skills

Programming Languages

• C
• Bourne Shell
• Perl
• Tcl/Tk
• Lisp (Emacs, Scheme, MacLisp)
• C++
• Fortran
• VMS DCL

My primary work is now done in C with a fair amount of scripting in shell, Tcl/Tk and Perl. I have also worked with various common code management tools such as make, CVS, RCS, MMS, and CMS. I have even done small projects in Pascal, PL/1, 8086 Macro, and VAX Macro. I deny any knowledge of COBOL so don't ask....

Operating Systems

Unix

Including SunOS 4/5, HP-UX, Linux, Irix, and Digital Unix. Primary focus has been on interprocess communications and network programming with some work using Xt and Motif. I have a small heterogenous network at home running SunOS 4, Solaris 7, MacOS 8, and Linux 2 which has given me a solid base in systems configuration and management (I have succefully configured sendmail without using the m4 macros...).

VAX/VMS

Interprocess communication methods; general purpose mathematical software in C and Fortran; simulating physical processes; writing utility programs and user interfaces; streamlining system management procedures; installing, configuring and developing public domain and free software. Have also been involved in the development of GNU Emacs for VMS and the GNU VMSLIB project. For those of you who think this is trivial, I was doing this before the existence of GNU autoconf.... Alas, this whole project seems to have fallen by the wayside.

Numerical Techniques

Experience with data modelling and simulation, linear algebra problems, solutions to ordinary and partial differential equations, sorting methods, data filtering and smoothing, and various integral transform techniques.

Education History

University of Rochester

Rochester, NY

M.A. Physics, May 1988.
Ph.D. Physics, February 1994.
Ph.D. Thesis title: "Measurements of Sub-barrier Transfer Yields in ³²S+⁹³Nb,⁹⁸Mo,¹⁰⁰Mo Reactions at 180°."

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cambridge, MA

B.S. Physics, June 1984.
Thesis title: "A Simple Two-Parameter Model for First-Order Phase Transitions."

Additional Training

• C++ Training (Digitial Equipment Corporation), 1995
• SNMP Network Management (Global Knowledge), 1999

Employment History

FT Interactive Data Corporation	New York, NY
Senior Programmer/Analyst	November 1996-present

Wrote significant portions of a "near-time" relay system for keeping an Oracle database in sync with a Sybase database. Maintenance and redesign of a data delivery system using async, bisync and FTP protocols.

Prior to August, 1999, I worked for Muller Data Corporation which was acquired by FT/Interactive Data.

Market Arts / WebFacts	New York, NY
Project Lead	December 1995-November 1996

Responsible for design, implementation, and day-to-day operations of a web-server hit-tracking system for use in third-party audits. Also performed various unix system adminstration activities including web and mail server configuration.

Market Arts WebFacts has significantly changed since 1996 and became (was acquired by?) as Metis Technologies which seems to no longer have anything to do with the business I was once a part of.

Reuters Analytics Group	Stamford, CT
Programmer/Analyst	January 1995-December 1995

Responsible for design and development of term structure estimation algorithms and programs in C. Also designed and implemented C++ classes related to option-adjusted spread calculations for Reuter Bond Window.

Tobin and Associates, Inc.	Rochester, NY
Programmer/Analyst	March 1994-September 1994

Contract assignment to Martin Marietta Internal Information Systems in Utica, NY. Design and development of: a customized client-server transaction system for quality control project "SQS"; a customized asynchronous message queuing package to optimize response for a multi-platform factory-management project.

University of Rochester	Rochester, NY
Graduate Research Assistant	1987-February 1994

Graduate Research Assistant in Experimental Nuclear Physics at the tandem Van de Graaff accelerator facility. Experience in instrument design and CAD use, nanosecond electronics, data acquisition and analysis. Wrote a Monte Carlo simulation for use in comparison with and identification of experimental data. Assistant to the VAX/VMS system manager in maintenance and system programming tasks including software installation and development.

University of Rochester	Rochester, NY
Graduate Teaching Assistant	Fall 1986

Graduate Teaching Assistant for an introductory physics course. Corrected and graded assignments, planned and taught recitations, and provided tutoring.

Charles Stark Draper Laboratory	Cambridge, MA
Software Engineer	1983-1986

Responsible for simulating an inertial guidance system in an oversight role for hardware development by General Electric. Also analyzed CID image data from hardware test equipment. Written in Fortran, Pascal, Assembler and PL/1 on an IBM mainframe, PCs, and VAX/VMS. Work during 1983 was part-time while attending MIT.

Project Details

Communications Support

FT/Interactive Data Corporation
As part of a major rewrite effort, designed and implemented communications software to support product delivery (financial data) via async, bisync, and FTP while maintaining a full audit trail which could be viewed in near real-time by operators using a Powerbuilder front-end.

"Near-Time" Database Synchronization

FT/Interactive Data Corporation
As part of a migration effort, database updates on a VAX/VMS system running Sybase had to be mirrored in near real-time to an Oracle database under HP-UX. This was accomplished via triggers in Sybase which would caption the data and queue it for transmission via as separate TCP/IP based program to the HP where it was inserted into Oracle. As a later supplement, the ability to split the update stream to multiple Oracle databases was added. This was to facilitate the decision to move from HP-UX to Sun/Solaris before the former migration was complete.

WebFacts Audit System

Market Arts WebFacts
Developed and managed the "audit" software used as a web-server plug-in to provide an audit-trail of web-server accesses suitable for third-party verification of usage claims. The primary challenges of this project were managing the large data transmissions over a public network.

Option-Adjusted Spread Calculations

Reuters Analytics Group
Developed an option-adjusted spread model which used the term structure model described below and volatility information from history treasury yields as input. This model was designed for use in the "Reuter Bond Window" software package.

Term Structure Analysis

Reuters Analytics Group
Developed a term-structure model suitable based on U.S. Government Treasury bond prices. This model was designed for use in the "Reuter Bond Window" software package.

VAX-IBM "Real-Time" Data Transfers

Martin Marietta
Part of a quality control and inspection software package used to track incoming lots of material for construction. When such a lot of material arrived, data was transferred from the IBM to the VAX via ftp and required a batch process to periodically poll for data availability. The modified package initiated a process from the IBM to the VAX, passing the VAX process the data. This reduced a 10--20 minute delay (due to the polling interval) to less than one minute with less system load. The VAX side of the task involved moving the data between several machines in a WAN and utilized several IPC methods. The application was written in C and made extensive use of VMS system services. Because of the "critical data" nature, and due to audit requirments, considerable care went into fail-safe design.

Asynchronous Message Queuing Package

Martin Marietta
Part of a factory management system that tracked material on the shop floor. Serious performance problems due to requiring considerable initialization of X resources and database resources were reduced by allowing the database queries to be done in a separate process. The asynchronous message queuing package was written in C under SunOS 4.1.3 in a general fashion freeing the developer from issues of interprocess communication.

Simulation of Projectile Breakup Reactions

University of Rochester/NSRL
Development and maintenance of a Monte Carlo simulation of the ⁷Li --> α+t reaction. Included customized random number generators, kinematics, and graphical display of data. This simulation was used for comparison with and identification of experimental data.

Thin Film Vacuum Deposition

University of Rochester/NSRL
Argon-beam sputtering was used to deposit thin films of various isotopically enriched metals on carbon backing foils. Carbon backing thicknesses varied from 5--100μg/cm ², metal foil thickness varied from 40--200 μg/cm².

Introductory Fortran Seminars

University of Rochester/NSRL
Organized and led a six-week introduction to programming in the Fortran 77 language as a supplement to a required course on Mathematical Physics. Each session was attended by 8--12 graduate students and covered: language elements and data types, syntax, simple structured programming, examples of physical computation, and issues of numerical stability.

Charged-Particle Detection and Identification

University of Rochester/NSRL
The Rochester Recoil Mass Spectrometer was used to separate reactants from reaction products at a level of 1:10⁸. Additional discrimination of approximately 1:10⁴ was obtained by measuring gas ionization and energy deposited in solid-state silicon detector. Responsibilities included equipment selection and testing, design of detector mounts, system optimization (gas pressures, voltage levels, noise suppression), electronics assembly, fabrication of thin polypropylene transmission windows, and software for data analysis.

Simulation of CID Image Acquisition

Charles Stark Draper Laboratory
A charge-injected device (CID) was to be used for feedback in a missile guidance system. The system was required to identify a stellar image in a noisy background. The simulation included effects of Gaussian optics, various CID noise sources (e.g., shot noise, read-out noise, dark current), hardware image filtering, and image identification.

CID Image Processing

Charles Stark Draper Laboratory
The CID imaging system mentioned above was partially implemented in hardware. This partial implementation required all image processing to be performed in software. An HP9000 microcomputer was used for data collection. The data transferred to an IBM PC/XT using the IEEE488 protocol. The image data was then processed using various techniques, including finite-difference methods to simulate electronic bandpass filtering. Responsibilities included data transfer and image processing.

GNU Emacs

Pretester and developer since 1989. Contributed numerous minor fixes to both the main code line and the VMS branch, most notably the mail handling code in the VMS branch. Around 2000, the emacs pretesters mailing list effectively became defunct. Somewhere, there is still a development team, but I no longer participate in pretesting or hacking it's internals.

Keystone

Keystone is a problem tracking system which was available from Stonekeep Consulting and later by White Pajamas. I worked to maintain the PostgreSQL compatibility until Keystone was acquired by White Pajamas (PostgreSQL is an open-source RDBMS with excellent standard SQL compliance).

Miscellaneous

Foreign Experience

• Spent two months during 1983 in Mexico City writing payroll software for charitable organization.

Languages

• Spanish (written and spoken). It's been a few years, so I'm rusty.

Personal Interests

I've taken up astronomy as a hobby and have acquired several telescopes and some imaging equipment. I first fell in love with astronomy as a child and had expected to make it my career but took something of a detour.

I enjoy outdoor activities; camping, hiking, bicycling are occasional hobbies of mine; not as regular as I would like! Until 1993, I avoided owning a car and relied on my bicycle (a 1985 Peugot Canyon Express) for any transportation needs over three or four miles. Shorter than that and I would walk.

I love to read, and am particularly fond of science-fiction. I've been subscribing to Analog since 1978. I probably spend too much on SF books; twice I've given away my collection of books, each time 300-400 titles. I have that many now and am starting to run out of space (bummer).

Affiliations and Offices

• Association of Computing Machinery
• Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
• American Physical Society
• Astronomical Society of the Pacific
• American Association of Physics Teachers
• American Association of Variable Star Observers
• Rockland Astronomy Club
• NYC PS 102 School Leadership Team
• DECUS (Digital Equipment Corporation User Society), 1990-1998
• DECUS GRALUG (Rochester, NY) Tape Librarian, 1990-1994

Publication History

Papers, Etc.

• Sub-barrier One- and Two-Neutron Pickup Measurements in ³²S+⁹³Nb,^98,100Mo Reactions at 180°, R.B.Roberts, S.B.Gazes, J.E.Mason, M.Satteson, S.G.Teichmann, L.L.Lee, Jr., J.F.Liang, J.C.Mahon, and R.J.Vojtech, Physical Review C 47, R1831 (1993).
• Direct Processes in 54-MeV ⁷Li Breakup Reactions on ¹²C and ¹⁹⁷Au Targets and the Extraction of Astrophysical Cross Sections, S.B.Gazes, J.E.Mason, R.B.Roberts and S.G.Teichmann, Physical Review Letters 68, 2 (1992).
• Coulomb and Nuclear Effects in Direct Breakup of 54-MeV ⁷Li+¹²C,¹⁹⁷Au, J.E.Mason, S.B.Gazes, R.B.Roberts, and S.G.Teichmann, Physical Review C45, 6 (1992).
• Breakup-fusion as a Source of Prompt Protons in Low-Energy ²⁸Si+⁹⁸Mo,⁵⁸Ni Reactions, S.G.Teichmann, S.B.Gazes, J.E. Mason, R.B.Roberts, and H.J.Kim, Physics Letters B283, 37 (1992).
• Non-Statistical Proton Emission in ¹⁶O+⁴⁵Sc,⁹⁸Mo and ²⁸Si+⁵⁸Fe,⁹⁸Mo Fusion Reactions, S.G.Teichmann, J.E.Mason, R.B.Roberts, M.Satteson, and S.B.Gazes, Bulletin of the American Physical Society, Spring 1991.
• Direct Breakup of ⁷Li+¹²C,¹⁹⁷Au Reactions, J.E.Mason, R.B.Roberts, S.G.Teichmann, and S.B.Gazes, Bulletin of the American Physical Society, Fall 1989.

Invited Talks

• Quantum Tunnelling Measurements using the Rochester Recoil Mass Spectrometer, given to the SUNY at Geneseo Physics Department, May 1993.
• Nuclear Physics at the University of Rochester: Sub-barrier Transfer Reactions, given to the Valparaiso University Physics Department, October 1989.

Contributed Talks

• Sub-barrier One- and Two-Neutron Pickup Measurements in ³²S+⁹³Nb^98,100Mo, reactions at 180°, given at the Spring 1993 joint meeting of the APS and AAPT.
• Energy Dependence of 180� Sub-barrier Transfer Reactions in ³²S+^92,98Mo,⁹³Nb Systems, given at the Fall 1989 meeting of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics.